About a week ago I decided to format and reinstall my computer stuff. It needed a good cleaning out, and I was trying to figure out a way to have 98 as a 2nd OS on it. That didn't work and I've officially given up on the idea. Anyway, 83 curse words, 7 headaches, and a few hours later, I have my XP back up and running. Over the first week of having it reinstalled, I was working on reinstalling everything, downloading a bunch of stuff (over my crappy little 56k..) and getting everything back to the way I like it. Today, I decided to install my scanner software that actually came with my scanner. That was a very bad idea. Soon as its installed, it needs to restart. So it does. And then it restarts again. And again. And again. I can't do anything in my OS without it sporadically restarting as soon as I really try to do anything. I couldn't even back up my recent files without it restarting. I figured I'd somehow gotten ahold of some virus, since it was acting so much like one. So I ended up formatting again, losing all the stuff I'd recently DLed that I hadn't been able to back up yet. Once I had XP back, I tried installing my scanner again, thinking it was just coincidence that my computer was acting all funny right after I'd installed it. Nono, how wrong was I. It started doing it again. So this time I go into safe mode to fix the problem (st00pid me who didn't try that earlier) and now everything works again. I started pulling junk out of my zip disks that had backed up files from last week's format/reinstall adventure, only to find something terribly, hideously wrong with my zip drive. it keeps taking the disk image or something and writing it into the next disk that goes in, completely destroying the data I may have already had on it. Thus, I lost all my links to Favorites I'd saved up for over a year. I had A LOT of places I liked to go to, or things I'd found of interest I may have liked to go back to. All gone now. I lost a bunch of artwork I'd been working on too. So Imma wee bit miffed right now. Later I have to redo the network again. That was another adventure in itself last week. Hoy. Got a lot to do. Anyone else ever have something go terribly wrong with their computers?
Emm not me. Not terribly anyway. I've had some pretty close calls though. IE shortly after getting my new computer my hard disk got some errors of some kind on it. I couldn't load windows or anything. I trid putting it in my old machine but the partitions were too big for the BIOS in the old machine . Anyway I comvinced my mum to get me a new 80gb hard disk so that I could back my stuff up on it. I used that disk to install XP, copied everything from my old drive, low level formatted the old disk to get rid of the errors and basically resored my comp to how it was but with my main stuff on my new drive and backup stuff on my old drive. So no data loss but there very well could have been. Also I've had errors with my registry forcing me to some really complex file moving around to restore it back using the win XP recovery console. That's happened 4 times and I still haven't found the cause. Anyway I keep all my data on D:, E:, F:, G: and H:. and when I reinstall windows I only have to format C:. Works out better in the end .
if I could ever get my hard drive to play nice and partition like I ever want it to, I'd prolly like to do that, with keeping files on seperate drives. But my hard drive is a satanic goat ****er like that. Or maybe I'm just doing something wrong.
The IDE controller on my old (K7S5A) mobo decided to go tits up and take out some of my data, most notably, some of my music videos (yeah, you heard me. This is the full list). The only ones it took were the ones most recently downloaded. At this point, my collection was quite large and I was only grabbing stuff that two people, both living in Siberia and both on 14.4 modems, had. Plus, I never figured out exactly what all I lost, so that pissed me off royally. At least I got a newer, better and faster motherboard out of it.
My HDD failed. Grinding sounds and all. 5 years of data, stuff that doesn't even exist anymore. (I checked) this was when a 12/8/40 CDRW cost 200+ Me was very sad.
A few years a go when 30 GB was big, my hardrive failed, I lost 3 years worth of data, loads of games, all my music (some of which was very rare) and some usefull programs. That tourght me a valuable lession, Backup everything you don't want to loose.
I have had horrible experiences with just about every computer I've ever had. Even now I get a "Memory_Management" BSOD every now and again when I boot up XP. The first PC I ever built was an AMD K6-2 450. Gigabyte mobo, 64mb PC100 and a Voodoo 3 2000. At the time, it was the thing but I was soon seeking an upgrade. So, I bought a P3 550 and new Mobo from the now deceased Tech-direct.com. Upon assembling the computer, it refused to see ANY devices on ANY IDE channels. Looking back on the situation, this could well have been due to inexperience and other things but at the time I was damned if I could get it to work. So, back to Tech-direct.com - I sent it back as "Faulty". 2 days later I get a ring from Tech-direct.com saying "Sorry, we've gone into liquidation so you can't have a refund". Nice, so I was £100-odd quid out of pocket. Unshaked, a few months later I decided to try again. This time a brand new mobo and a classic slot Athlon 750. I was excited because I'd saved up enough to buy such beast - at the time it was top of the range. I bought the CPU from a local shop called UCS and bought the AOpen mobo from Software Warehouse aka One Stop Computer Solutions. So, I assembled the computer, turned it on....blank. Monitor LED was orange. GFX problem? I took out my Voodoo and tried a friends Savage. Same thing. Bought a 300w PSU suspecting power problem. Same thing. I was quite upset being as this was the second time It'd happened. I went back to Software Warehouse to return the faulty mobo only to find the shop boarded up and a note reading "Software Warehouse has recently gone into administration". I couldn't believe it. My friends believe I have a curse that every computer supplier I bought from goes bust! That's why I always buy my stuff from OcUK
My worst computer is experience is happening as we speak. Well my school just bought some new systems for the music department all with creative sblive 5.1 platinums so i thought nice at a mear 56 quid ill upgrade from my standard 5.1. So after the nightmare delivery were i wasnt in and parcelline wanted me to pay 13 quid to recieve it on a saturday as they've ceased to do evening delivery. I got my card and i was all happy so i put in my pc and start up so firstly i discover creative have shipped me a spanish drivers cd well done creative. So i go to there site and download the xp drivers but discover they have to be overinstalled over the original 9x ones. So i go back to there site and guess wot no 9x drivers. So i stick in the spanish and install it guessin my way through with my amazing 'G' grade in spanish lol. Anyway at this point my system has gone totaly tits up half my harware doesnt work so i have to reinstall xp grrr! Neway thousands of installs later every naughtyword under the sun and instead of getting somewere xp no longer sees my network card ahhhh poo. Moral of the story dont use micro$haft or creative
I decided to flash my bios, bad idea. Two of my secondary video cards decided to go tits up, and temporarily take a NIC too. tried flashing back, no luck, then decided since ME was being a prick I would reinstall it. Nope my computer didnt like that. Ok lets try XP Pro, $200 later no luck. AHHHHHH! To make a long story short, it took me three weeks to format ME, reinstall it, uninstall it, install XP 4 times, finally the last time being complete. then I finally had my puter back. THREE WEEKS!!!!! well I left a 5 Gig partition for linux, somehow slakware didnt take, so I decided to leave my 40 Gig drive 5 Gig short until im ready to deal with it.
my worst computer expoerience was when i decided 2 use a disk clean up thingy, and clean my hard disk it did!!!!
2x Hard drives dieing on me 1x Duff PSU (that Tekheads wouldn't replace) I have been unlucky with companies sending me the wrong stuff as well notably a motherboard from Dabs that took 2 weeks and 2 replacements before they finally sent me a RAID board! On a software side, I have accidentally formatted the wrong HDD (taking out 9Gb of music ), had XP somehow corrupt everything on both hard drives, Windows 98SEs When it comes to hardware, I have set a few wires on wire when I wired up the power switch wrong on my old motherboard......nothing utterly disastrous in terms of nuking every component though, thank gord!
That's all very well but I did that and used the XP installer on the cd to delete and re format my C: drive.... only to find out it had reshuffled my drive letters and I'd just formatted my D: drive with all my data on....
I have a guide on sperating windows from the rest of your data: This also boosts system speed as well as less fragmentation. http://www.zapwizard.com/Partitioning
Sorry if this is a little off topic but Zapwizard I have followed your guide and everything is fine apart from I can't delete c:\documents and settings and mount a partion there. I am using XP. Can you help me at all. Cheers Sowler
My worst computer experience was when I was installing my K7S5A when i first got it, I'd done literally hundreds of motherboard swaps before so i was no noob, but for some reason it wasn't booting up, no matter what i did i only got a blank screen. Spent the entire day on it, then at 10.00 pm when i was getting ready to pack it in and take the mobo back... I'D FORGOTTEN TO PUT IN THE ****ing RAM!!!!!!! I was unbelievably miffed after that.
My worest ever problem was when I was working part time for SGi in Stourbridge, a server room full of 12 x 6' tall, 19" rack Origin servers got flooded in 1' of raw sewage. A toilet pipe above broke, and of course, server rooms are like air locks, no water or air can get in, or out.
Heh, my old computer had a flakey IDE controller, so every once in a while, I'd reboot (it was a 98 system, later upgraded to the evil ME), and it would fail to recognise one or the other IDE channels. So, I'd turn off the computer, go get a soda or something, and then come back, turn it back on, and go try to reinstall my windows drivers for the IDE channels. Very annoying, although I didn't lose any data. Same motherboard wouldn't recognse CD-ROM drives for the life of it, when I was assembling the darn thing. Finaly got it fixed, but it was all too anoying. Also have had NT adventures, back in the old days, before the light of 2000 shone through the darkness. Spent 3 months trying off and on to get NT to install on a computer, no go. It finaly installed, but corrupted itself, etc... That computer now runs 2000 Also, recently I had to RMA my video card, I got a bad one from PNY (You would think that they would test the cards, since you are paying >$300). Also had to buy a soundcard, because my onboard crystal audio chip was causing system lockups. Grr. Not happy... Not wanting to turn this into a rant thread, though
my worst problem, windows 98........ i hate that frigging thing.... win xp...... despite what most say, i think its the closest thing bill has come to perfect.
Its a sysadmin urban myth, wether or not it happened at a SGi in stourtbridge is another issue, but its a clasic piece of sysadmin humour, along with the servers that exhast from left to right, and were aranged in a line along the wall..... the end ones temp was close to 140 degrees.
